Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Tarrare: The Hungriest Man in History

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Have you ever been really full after a meal? Like really really full? Could you imagine eating and never feeling full? Like going to an all you can eat fish restaurant and then getting kicked out for eating too much and going fishing so you can eat more fish? Well, there was one Frenchman who could never be satiated and the results of this condition were….astonishing. Learn more about Tarrare and his medical condition on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever been really full after a meal? Like, really, really full? Well, could you imagine eating and never feeling full? Like going to an all-you-can-eat-fish restaurant and then getting kicked out for eating too much fish and then going fishing so you could eat more fish? While there was one Frenchman who could never be satiated and the results of his condition were astonishing. Learn more about Tara and his medical condition, which thankfully has never been seen since,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Masterclass. If you've ever wanted to learn something new, wouldn't you want to learn it from the

very best people in their field? Masterclass is exactly that. Online courses where you can learn from the very top people in the world. Learn how to cook from Gordon Ramsey or learn science from Yield de Gras Tyson, photography from Annie Leibowitz, filmmaking from Spike Lee, Magic from Pennanteller, and tennis from Serena Williams. And that list only scratches the surface. You can start learning from the world's best for only $15 per month. Just go to everything-dash everywhere.com slash masterclass, or click on the link in the show notes. I've never had to put a disclaimer at the start of a show before, but I feel like I should for this one.

There's no explicit language coming, nor is there anything suggestive or any adult themes. However, much of what I'm going to be talking about is pretty gross. Think Garbage Pale Kids times 10 level of disgusting. So I don't want any emails about how this episode was gross and you're going to stop listening to the show. This is history, people, and sometimes history is gross. So having given fair warning,

let me introduce Tara. He was born sometime around 1772, somewhere around Leon France. We know next to nothing about his origin, including his real name. We don't know if Tara was his real name or a stage name. We do, however, know that he existed due to the extensive amount written about him during his lifetime. He grew up a pretty normal kid as far as we can tell. However, once he had puberty, he developed an appetite. By this, I don't mean he ate formulae.

a day or he had second or third helpings at dinner. By this, I mean he ate constantly and ate an astonishing amount of food. By the time he was 17 years old, he could eat his entire body weight worth of food in a single day, and he only weighed 100 pounds or 45 kilograms, actually rather skinny for a 17-year-old boy. In a single day, he could eat a quarter of a cow all by himself. Very quickly after developing this appetite, his parents kicked him out of the house. The late 18th century was a time when getting enough calories was still a big issue for most people. Funding, this sort of consumption, would have bankrupted almost anyone. He left home and basically became a homeless vagrant. He would beg for food, scrounge up anything and everything

he could eat, and eventually fell in with a group of traveling thieves. He began to do street performances where he would eat anything which people would give him. He would devour an entire bag of apples in minutes, sometimes swallowing them whole. While he was performing and grabbing the attention of the crowd, his compatriots would be pickpocketing the crowd while they weren't paying attention. In addition to eating food, he would swallow stones, corks, and anything else which the audience gave him, including live animals. He eventually set off on his own as a street performer in Paris, doing the same routine, mostly so he could get as much food as possible. However, his direction changed in 1792. The French Revolution had started and its neighbors formed an alliance and had gone

to war against France. It was known as the war of the first coalition. At the age of 20, Tara decided to join the army to service country. It's this period where we know most about Tarah because the observations of him were so well documented. In the army, he had a difficult time because he was only given a single soldier's ration of food per day. He began doing favors for everyone he could to get their food or their leftovers. He would scavenge the dung heaps and garbage pits in camp looking for food. He was so lethargic and listless that he was finally sent to a French military hospital for observations. Here too, he began scrounging around the garbage for food as well as taking food from other patients. There he encountered Pierre Francois Percy, the head surgeon of the hospital

who became fascinated by his case. He and other doctors started subjecting Tara to experiments. They first assigned him quadruple rations, which he devoured with no problem. To put this into perspective, this would be the equivalent of 12 regular meals per day. He then had a meal prepared for 15 people to see if there was a limit to what he could consume in one sitting. Tarah consumed all the food laid out and then summarily fell asleep. Then the experiment started to get weirder. And remember, my warning at the start of the show. He was given a live cat, and he torn to the cat with his teeth and disemboweled it.

He sucked out all of the blood out of the cat and then consumed everything other than the bones. A half an hour later, he coughed up the hair and the fur as if he was a bird of prey. He did the same thing with a puppy. He was given a full-grown eel. He crushed the skull of the eel with his teeth and then swallowed the entire eel whole. And here, I should probably describe the man himself. From all accounts, if you saw him on the street, you probably wouldn't notice anything different about him at first. However, he had an extremely large mouth. His cheeks were incredible flaps of

skin, and he could supposedly put 12 apples or eggs in his mouth at one time. Go take out a dozen eggs and try to stick them all in your mouth. That's a big mouth. While he looked normal under his shirt, he had an incredible layer of sagging skin around his midsection. He had so much loose skin he could supposedly wrap it around himself like a belt. It came from the fact that when he ate so much, his stomach would expand like a balloon. Even if he did look normal, there was one thing about him which everyone would have noticed

almost immediately before you even saw him. His smell. He was described as being so smelly that, quote, to such a degree that he could not be endured within the distance of 20 paces, unquote. After he ate, he smelled even worse. He was constantly sweating. and he had an incredibly high body temperature.

Vapers rising off his body were said to be visible. It was as if he was a real-life pig pen from the Peanuts cartoon and the stink lines drawn around him were real. And he was also constantly belching and farting. I once encountered a man like this in Bulgaria. He smelled like an ammonia truck crashed into a sewage treatment plant. He was literally kicked off the bus I was on by the driver because he smelled so bad.

True story. Now, you are also probably wondering that, if you eat that much food, it has to go somewhere. Well, he was reported to suffer from chronic diarrhea, which was, quote, fetid beyond all conception, unquote. At this point, he might have been a medical curiosity, but he was hardly fit for military service. However, the higher-ups thought that he may be of use. They thought he might be the perfect person to serve as a courier of secret messages. He was given a small box containing a message, which he swallowed. Two days later, he passed the box, and the message was still intact.

With the experimental success, a demonstration was performed for a group of generals from the Army of the Rhine on the front with Germany. He swallowed another box for the generals, and then as a reward, he was given a wheelbarrel full of raw cow's lungs and liver, which weighed 30 pounds or 14 kilograms. He ate the entire wheelbarrel full of Ophill in front of the generals. His first mission was to get a message to a colonel which was imprisoned behind enemy lines. It turns out that Tara was a horrible spy. He was captured almost immediately as he stanked to high heaven and didn't speak any German. Then, once captured, he almost immediately told them everything. The Germans chained him to a latrine and waited.

When he finally passed the box, the message said nothing other than for the colonel to notify them if he actually received the message. The Germans set up a mock execution where they marched him to the next. gallows, only to give him a reprieve at the last minute, then sent him back to France, probably because they felt sorry for the guy. Back in France, he returned to the hospital. They tried to find something which would cure him, but nothing worked. He would sneak out to eat the waste outside of butcher shops. He would fight with dogs in the street for dead animals. In the hospital, and remember, I warned you, he was caught drinking the blood from patients who had received bloodlettings, which was still a thing in the late 18th century. He was also caught consuming

cadavers in the hospital morgue. He was evicted from the hospital when a 14-month-old baby disappeared. There was no hard evidence, but Tarah was the chief suspect, and no one would bother to defend him anymore. What happened to him the next several years is unknown. However, in 1796, he showed up at a hospital in Versailles. He was sick and thought it was because of a gold fork he had swallowed two years earlier. The doctors, however, diagnosed him with tuberculosis. A month later, he passed away at the age of 26. After his death, his body, not surprisingly, began to decompose rapidly. An autopsy was performed to try to get some insight as to how he was able to do what he did. The first thing the doctors found is that when his mouth is opened, you could see straight into his

stomach. His gullet was that wide. His stomach was enormous and took up almost half of his abdominal cavity. He likewise had an enlarged liver and gallbladder. His stomach was also filled with pus and ulcers which probably came from many of the foreign objects which he swallowed over the years. In the over 200 years since his death, there has never been another medical case like Tara. There have been other people with large appetites, but no one who was capable of consuming so much food. It would be reasonable to be suspicious. about this story, but for the fact that there were so many eyewitnesses and that it was documented by reputable doctors of the era. Modern doctors suspect that Tara probably had some

condition with his thyroid, hypothalamus, or amygdala. This can affect appetite, as well as body temperature, and metabolism. His stomach, skin, and cheeks were probably extended due to years of constant expansion from eating so much. To this day, Tarah remains the only person, who, if they said they were so hungry they could eat a horse, could actually. actually back up their claim. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. Today's five-star review comes from listener Happy Otter from Apple Podcasts. They write,

A great short listen and learn. This podcast has distilled down very interesting topics from all over the world into a relevant and captivating podcast, a too good to miss podcast. Well, thank you very much, Happy Otter. Doing the research is the interesting part of the show, and after 320 episodes, I think I'm getting the hang of it. I would also like to give a big thank you to everyone who listens. The show recently passed the half million download mark.

Hopefully, if the show can keep growing and gaining listeners, I'll be able to add some new features to the show, which I have planned. You kind of looks like a baby. Come here, I'm going to eat you. I'm bigger than you. I'm higher in the food chain. Get in my belly. Come on!

You're lucky we're man. Can I run? heart. Dr. Eval, let me make your deal, all right. You get the motto, you keep your money, and I'll get your baby. I want my baby back, baby, back, baby, back, baby back, baby back, ribs. I want my baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back, excuse me. Chili, baby, baby back ribs.